All posts tagged Halloween Candy

I nearly squealed when I saw that Junior Mints was celebrating Halloween with black and orange centers. This may be old news. Maybe the Tootsie Roll Co. has been making these for the last 16 years, but I don’t remember seeing them until recently.

Sadly, these Halloween Junior Mints don’t have any special flavors. I feel like orange mint is a missed opportunity (I love orange mint), but points to Junior Mints to giving us bright orange and deep black gooey peppermint centers.

Summer is winding down and that means the retail world is turning its attention towards Halloween (and even Christmas). What else does that mean? All kinds of seasonal candy for us to try!

Do you like chocolate? Do you like caramel? Do you like apples? Do you like fun apple shape? Then Hershey’s (new?) caramel apple chocolates are just for you!

I’m not a huge fan of Hershey’s chocolate. It’s okay, but it’s also whatever. And I don’t don’t like actual caramel apples, at all. The last time I had one was 25+ years ago, and I swore them off for the rest of my life when I found myself staring down a tiny green worm that poked it’s head out of the piece of apple I’d just bitten. Yuck!

As for these? I’m actually enjoying them. Even more so than I thought. I figured it would be a fun seasonal candy and maybe getting through the whole bag would be a chore, but they’re actually pretty good. The chocolate mixes well with the apple flavoring of the caramel. I recommend this!

I spent a few hours of one of my recent days off driving around town, bored out of my mind, and looking for some junk to spend my money on. I went to the usual places like Walmart, Target, etc., but then I remembered a hot tip I had gotten just a few days earlier regarding some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pillows at Dollar General.

I’m sure everyone knows what a Dollar General is. They are similar to stores such as Family Dollar and Big Lots. They sell a lot of off-the-wall and cheap merchandise. Some of it it is priced pretty low, but some things can be fairly pricey. In my experience, these stores are usually not located in the best parts of town and the stores themselves seem way too small for the amount of product they have crammed in there. The aisles are REALLY close together and stuff is usually packed to the ceiling on risers.

Dollar General is like a time-warp in the same way that K-Mart is. No matter where a Dollar General seems to spring up, whether it’s a brand new building or whether they took over a pre-existing one, these stores always seem stuck in the 1980s. From the store layout to the products themselves. There’s so many interesting products you didn’t know existed but you can basically buy everything that you truly need from a Dollar General, with the exception of produce and meat.

Obviously, something this awesome could not go without purchase. If it was based on the current Nickelodeon series, I would’ve given it a pass. Luckily there’s a lot of classic ’80s cartoon TMNT merch to be found and I’m wearing a t-shirt right now to prove it. By the way, I know people say the Nick show is good, but sorry, I know it wouldn’t capture the same vibe and spirit of the original cartoon for me, personally.

In what may sound like heaven to some (such as myself) or a nightmare to others, when you work in the world of retail, you get see and access most holiday items way before the customer does and long before the holiday arrives. I’m fine with this and I’m always on the lookout for two things: Halloween candy and Christmas merchandise.

Mid-July is typically about the time my store starts getting in Halloween candy but Halloween came even earlier this year — a few items arrived in late June. Nothing too impressive. So far it’s been the standard stuff from Russell Stover and Reese’s, but candy caught my eye. It’s a candy I don’t even like but I couldn’t resist the gimmick:

3 Musketeers Muskefears fun-size bars! First off, I LOVE the name they’ve give them for Halloween — “Muskefears”. That’s awesome.

Secondly, while they didn’t really mess with wrappers too much, at least they added the Muskefears name to them.

Finally, they colored the nougat “Spooky Red”. I guess “Blood Red” would be too gruesome for the kiddies. The color quality of the photo above doesn’t really do them justice. They aren’t that pinkish looking but they are no way as dark red as the bag would have you believe.

If you like 3 Musketeers and you like Halloween, this is a big win for you. After buying the bag and eating one and then coming down off my Halloween rush, I remembered that 3 Musketeers are one of my least favorite candy bars. Why would you stop at a 3 Musketeers or Milky Way when a Snickers is obviously superior to both?

I came across a small pack of caramel apple Twizzlers last night. Dinosaur Dracula did a video review of them awhile back. Figuring these things probably aren’t all that great, there’s no way I would’ve bought a bag the size that Matt did but when you can pick up a small pack for 89 cents (or however much it was), why not?

These aren’t just plain Twizzler twists. They are filled twists. This is generally a bad sign as far as I’m concerned. I’ve tried a few variations of filled Twizzlers over the years and always kick myself for doing so because the candy is never very good. There’s always a gritty sugary texture to the filling and the caramel filling here is no exception. It’s much too sweet and completely overpowers the green apple-flavored twists (which they should make separately, without any filling). If you have a real caramel apple, it’s more apple than caramel so why are we being given more caramel than apple from these Twizzlers? Because it’s candy, I guess.

Caramel apple Twizzlers are okay and probably the best of all the filled Twizzlers I’ve ever had, but they are nothing I would ever buy again. I’m always much better sticking with the traditional strawberry Twizzlers.

I feel the same way about the Extra gum I bought. Extra does a lot of fruit and dessert flavored gums these days. For the fall season, they’ve introduced two new flavors: pumpkin spice and apple crisp. Again, they’re just too sweet (even though they are sugar free). I don’t know, maybe my taste buds are changing as I get older but I’m just not enjoying these types of things anymore. This could spell disaster for blog content! Apple Crisp Extra is better than Pumpkin Spice Extra but I had one stick of each and that was more than enough. They definitely smell like their namesakes but both are too sweet and the flavor isn’t very good.

I’m not a candy person anymore but I’m making the exception for Halloween. I’ve got a king size pack Reese’s cups, a theater box of Milk Duds and a big mix bag of Starburst, Three Musketeers, Snickers and Twix to keep me company all day long (I made sure to request the day off). Of course, I won’t be eating all of this candy or even most of it, but I’ll be picking my spots and taking what I please. Then I’ll finish off the rest of the candy over an extended period of time. I’ve done really well this year with cutting back on junk and hitting the gym — but I’m entitled to some Halloween candy!

The woman will be going to a Halloween party, I was invited, but per my “I don’t like people” rule, I declined. So, I’ll spend the night in solitude with candy and horror movies. I’m not sure what I’ll be watching though. I haven’t broken out my Universal DVDs yet, but I may set aside time for whatever is on my Netflix list as well.

How about you? How will you be celebrating the 2nd greatest holiday of the year?

I came across this order form earlier this year and right off the bat (no pun intended), this looked like an amazing Halloween candy. Luckily, after doing some more research, I was able to find scans of the wrappers.

That’s so awesome. Monster Bat, Vampire, Werewolf, Gravestone and Man Without A Head candy! I can’t tell if there’s a date in the fine print or not, but I’d imagine this is from the late ’70s or very early ’80s. I’m pretty that something like this was around the in the ’80s as well (I’m seeing visions of Frankenstein as a gummy candy), but “Drac-Snax” doesn’t ring a bell with me.